The Fiction of Gloria Naylor

Houses and Spaces of Resistance

Maxine Lavon Montgomery

Publication Year: 2010

The Fiction of Gloria Naylor is one of the very first critical studies of this acclaimed writer. Including an insightful interview with Naylor and focusing on her first four novels, the book situates various acts of insurgency throughout her work within a larger framework of African American opposition to hegemonic authority. But what truly distinguishes this volume is its engagement with African American vernacular forms and twentieth-century political movements.
In her provocative analysis, Maxine Lavon Montgomery argues that Naylor constantly attempts to reconfigure the home and homespace to be more conducive to black self-actualization, thus providing a stark contrast to a dominant white patriarchy evident in a broader public sphere. Employing a postcolonial and feminist theoretical framework to analyze Naylor’s evolving body of work, Montgomery pays particular attention to black slave historiography, tales of conjure, trickster lore, and oral devices involving masking, word play, and code-switching—the vernacular strategies that have catapulted Naylor to the vanguard of contemporary African American letters.
Montgomery argues for the existence of home as a place that is not exclusively architectural or geographic in nature. She posits that in Naylor’s writings home exists as an intermediate space embedded in cultural memory and encoded in the vernacular. Home closely resembles a highly symbolic, signifying system bound with vexed issues of racial sovereignty as well as literary authority. Through a re-inscription of the subversive, frequently clandestine acts of resistance on the part of the border subject—those outside the dominant culture—Naylor recasts space in such a way as to undermine reader expectation and destabilize established models of dominance, influence, and control.
Thoroughly researched and sophisticated in its approach, The Fiction of Gloria Naylor will be essential reading for scholars and students of African American, American, and Africana Literary and Cultural studies.

Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A predominant emphasis in the novels of Gloria Naylor is on the
ways that individuals counter the imposition of hegemonic authority.
Opposition strategies figuring into her fictional cosmology may entail group assertion, in the case of an urban community’s attempt
to challenge an intransigent political system hostile to the aspirations
of the working-class poor, or they may take on a covert, individual
configuration, involving a woman’s effort...

1. Navigating a Blues Landscape: The Women of Brewster Place

Inner-City Blues

In The Women of Brewster Place Gloria Naylor situates the experiences
of the folk within a sociopolitical frame involving the struggle
for self-determination on the part of blacks in late-twentiethcentury
America. Organizational efforts by Abshu Ben-Jamal and
Kiswana Browne recall the grass-roots activism...

Of Housewives and Revolutionaries

Naylor presents a portrait of an urban community poised on the
brink of sociopolitical change, and in her rendering of Brewster’s
evolutionary move into the late twentieth century, she foregrounds
the acts of insurgence on the part of the slumbering masses—the
nameless, faceless denizens of the city...

Refiguring Borders, Dismantling Walls

Brewster’s expanding borders serve as a site for the critique of externally
imposed conceptions of space. If the brick wall circumscribing
the community’s bounds limits the achievements and aspirations
of the working-class poor, then Mattie’s vision of a unified
community of women heralds the ability to transform the inner-city
neighborhood into a place of renewal and fulfillment...

2. Burning Down the Master’s House: Linden Hills

A House Is Not a Home

Like The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills examines the buried
history of African Americans in terms of the creative, often clandestine,
acts of rebellion arising from subaltern women. That these gestures
of revolt in Naylor’s second novel originate from the middleclass
wife and mother calls into question notions of marriage not
only as the sine qua non for personal fulfillment but also as the basis
of an aristocratic social order...

Good Housekeeping and Other Misnomers

Whereas The Women of Brewster Place culminates with Mattie
Michael’s dream of an empowered group of inner-city women who
dismantle a brick wall, narrative action in Naylor’s second novel
foregrounds an event that is similarly as incendiary: Willa’s discovery
of the documents connecting her with the maternal predecessors
who find themselves...

Stairways, Entrances, and Transitional Sites

It is not Braithwaite but Willie, the gutsy, outspoken folk poet, who
is to render a revised, comprehensive chronicle of Linden Hills—one
that takes into account the buried history of black women. Because
of his close association with individuals existing on the margins...

3. Finding Peace in the Middle: Mama Day

Since her appearance in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Sapphira Wade
has been the unwitting subject of varied and, at times, competing
critical readings drawn from African as well as European points of
view. Dorothy Perry Thompson regards the island matriarch as “the
conflation of the need for a new woman-centered spirituality...

Crossing Over to “The Other Place”

With a history rooted in cultural hybridity and a reification of
self-determining women who achieve semidivine stature, Willow
Springs presents itself, at least on a superficial level, as home—a site
of healing and renewal where parts torn as a result of the transatlantic
journey are restored (Gilroy)...

Being around Living Mirrors

In fictionalizing the legend of Sapphira, Naylor mediates between a
range of texts as she seeks to create an interstitial reality where individuals
are allowed to realize their unlimited identity and potential.
Unlike Linden Hills, with its account of Willa the beleaguered housewife
whose discovery of the documents that her maternal forebears
author culminates in death...

4. Mapping the New World Order: Bailey’s Café

In Search of Eve’s Garden

Last in a tetralogy, Bailey’s Café foregrounds the subversive gestures
that are to empower mid-twentieth-century African Americans in
the quest for wholeness, freedom, and self-identity. What is new to
Naylor’s evolving canon is a focus on the universal dimensions of
oppression and the necessity of mounting a strategy of resistance
that globalizes the struggle for positive sociopolitical change...

Rewriting the Virgin-Whore Dichotomy: A Tale of Two Marys

In rewriting the antecedent sources out of which Bailey’s Café
evolves, Naylor seeks to dismantle the negative images that delimit
female identity and achievement. Issues relevant to female sexuality
assume center stage with the antithetical representations of virgin
and whore...

Writing the Black Man’s Blues

Naylor’s fourth novel foregrounds the transnational journey home
in ways that encourage the reader to rethink predictable ways of
knowing and adopt a new basis for self and society—one predicated
upon the feminine. In this regard, Eve’s place serves as a liminal
space of becoming and possibility recalling the middle passage...

Conclusion

If there is a canonical story evolving out of Naylor’s first four novels,
that narrative involves the quest for autonomy, in both a literary
and racial sense—one that is encoded in the vernacular and bound
with figurations of an idealized home. For Naylor, home is a fluid
space embedded in cultural memory and rooted in a past that harks
back to her parents’ Robinsonville, Mississippi, roots and ultimately
ancient Africa...

Appendix. Opening Up the Place Called Home: A Conversation with Gloria Naylor

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